Data Engineering

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Apache Kafka provides distributed log store used by increasing numbers of companies and often forming the heart of systems processing huge amounts of data. This post shows how to use it for storing meteorological data and displaying this in a graphical dashboard with Graphite and Grafana

Lichess makes over 100GB of chess games from 2017 available on their website. This post shows how this data can be transformed with Apache Spark and analysed. Something for Data Engineers and Chess Enthusiasts alike!

Yesterday the Financial Times boldly declared that BP saved $7bn since 2014 by investing in Big Data technologies. I spent a couple of hours researching Big Data technologies associated with BP members of staff to try and build up a picture of exactly which technologies they are using.

Using microservices in your architecture is a very popular choice. Unfortunately it is also challenging to get it right. With the help of Twelve-Factor methodology, I will tell you how to set yourself up for a success rather than a disappointment.

In this post we compare how Cassandra and MariaDB can be configured to operate in clusters and how this affects response time for queries. We found Cassandra to scale well and to be highly configurable. MariaDB can be used with Galera Cluster but it does not provide horizontal scaling. Also NDB can be used to scale MySQL but it was not as configurable as Cassandra.

We've been comparing Cassandra and MariaDB in single node setups, exploring the issues of each in terms of performance and ease of use from a development perspective. In this article we explore the issues at play in such a setup such as the differences in queries, speed of response and the features that seperate these two technologies.

StreamSets Data Collector (SDC) is an open source tool for stream-based extracting, transforming and loading large quantities of data. It provides an easy to use UI on top of the underlying processing power of YARN and Spark Streaming with a large number of installable integrations with source and destination systems....

In this post I describe how to use Elastic's Rally to generate benchmarks for your private Elasticsearch queries and clusters. I'll be creating a benchmark which allows comparison of an unscored query with one where scoring is enabled.

For the last few months we’ve been working on a very DevOps focused project. As such we’ve used AWS, infrastructure as code, Docker and microservices. The different microservices were initially running all on one box, each with a different port. This solution wasn’t scalable or very practical. We couldn’t have...

This is the second blog post orientated around Bitcoin and its inner workings. The first post took the blockchain and broke down the algorithms which create the fundamental structure of any cryptocurrency. The post was separated into two sections; the first focusing on the block header and the second focusing...

In most microservice architectures, there are many opportunities and temptations for sharing code. In this post I will give advice based on my experience on when it should be avoided and when code reuse is acceptable. The points will be illustrated with the help of an example Spring Boot project.

This post uses Docker Compose to spin up a three container HTTP server. One container services the HTTP requests and delegates work to two other containers in a load-balanced way. Erlang is used for development to add a bit of extra challenge!

What is ‘Big’ Data? Big data is one of those buzz phrases that gets thrown round a lot, companies love saying they work with ‘Big’ data, but what is ‘Big’ data? When does data get so big that it can be called Big data? One Gigabyte? How about a Terabyte,...

OData Controllers offer an easy interface between data and your application, but require one controller per model type. These controllers often have a large amount of almost identical code. In this blog post, we look at using C# Generics to remove this duplication.